An asteroid called 2012 DA14 came within just 17,200 miles – a cosmic eyelash – of the earth. I watched live shots of it as it neared its closest point to our planet at 1:24 p.m. local time. The Jet Propulsion Lab at the California Institute of Technology offered a live web feed from the Gingin Observatory just outside Perth,Australia.

It was a long white streak going across the darkness of space. Simply fascinating. Particularly to those of us who remember being astounded by a live, but extremely grainy, transmission of the first human on the moon. A reminder of how far we’ve come technologically. What an amazing moment, both then and now.

Scientists calculated, within a few hundred feet, the exact path of DA14. Which is good because if it had hit the earth, it could have potentially killed millions.

Just 13 hours earlier, the world got a sense of the potential devastation such near-earth space objects can have when a meteorite a quarter the size of DA14 entered the atmosphere and exploded 18 to 32 miles above Chelyabinsk, Russia. Chelyabinsk, a city of one million, is about 930 miles east of Moscow.

The 10-ton, 49-foot-wide meteorite came in at 33,000 miles per hour, and despite breaking apart before reaching the ground, the atom-bomb-strength shock wave damaged an estimated 3,000 buildings and blew out a million square feet of glass. More than a thousand people sought treatment at hospitals, most for cuts from the glass. The website for The Guardian newspaper had some incredible video of the event.

Scientists say the meteorite, which came in from northeast to southwest, did not have anything to do with DA14, which is moving south to north. Meteors are meteoroids that have penetrated a planet’s atmosphere. An asteroid is larger than a meteoroid, but smaller than a planet. There’s been a lot of progress in tracking near-earth asteroids. And yet, it’s believed that NASA has found only about one in 10.

Asteroid DA14’s departure from our cosmic neighborhood will be visible from Europe and North America later this evening. Between 6 and 9 p.m. on NASA’s website you can watch coverage as it moves safely away from the earth.

Because it came so close, the earth’s gravity actually altered its orbit. Scientists expect DA14 to come back in 2046 and then in 2080, presumably in closer orbits.

A meteor in 1908 near the Tunguska River, also in Russia, was believed to be the cause of a blast estimated to have been a thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It leveled approximately 80 million trees over an 830 square-mile area and dust from the explosion hovered over Europe. Scientists have reached the conclusion that a six-mile-wide asteroid landed near present-day Yucatan 65 million years ago, leaving a 93-mile-wide crater and leading to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Suddenly, NASA doesn’t seem to be such a bad investment.

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